He jogged down the center aisle and turned at the third side lane, trying to remember the digital schematic. He hadn’t dared print it out. After making a wrong turn and then backtracking through the maze, he finally found his way to a stock of smaller canisters, set on industrial shelves. These bore yellow-and-black biohazard warning labels. Kateb was tempted to hold his breath in their presence, but he shook off his fears and shoved one into his satchel, rearranging the others to cover the telltale gap.
By the time Azzam passed by the security office again, Kateb was back at his desk, reclining in his chair with his feet propped up as if he had not moved at all. This time, the guard did not so much as glance into the room. Had he done so, he might have noticed the sweat glistening on Kateb’s brow.
As soon as Azzam’s footsteps faded, Kateb unlocked his computer and deleted the duplicate keycard from the system. He breathed a sigh of relief. The leather satchel at his feet that usually carried his coffee thermos now held a titanium canister of the same size. The hard part was over. There were no metal detectors or X-ray machines to pass through on the way out of the facility. Kateb could walk out the front door as if it were the end of any other nightshift. After that, he had a little vacation planned — a very profitable one.
CHAPTER 6
Nick’s phone chimed with a text at four thirty in the morning. He ignored the first one. At the second chime, Katy rolled over and elbowed him. “Make it stop,” she complained. “Why can’t you turn that thing off when we’re in bed?”
He leaned across his pillow and kissed her on the cheek. “You know why. Suck it up.”
Katy pushed him away with a palm to the forehead and rolled the other way. “You suck it up.”
Nick laughed at his wife and sat up to check his screen. “It’s the colonel. He wants me in his office, now.” He turned the phone toward her. “See, he capitalized NOW. He’s finally learned how to yell in text.” Katy did not look. She had already gone back to sleep.
Forty-five minutes later, Nick pulled his midnight blue ’67 Shelby through the gate at Andrews, flashing an ID card that identified him as an Air Force major. Five minutes after that, he parked in an unlit lot next to a large, mostly forgotten hangar facility on the southern end of the runway.
While he was pulling his duffel and sidearm out of the Mustang’s trunk, a phantom black Audi R8 pulled into the next space over. A big operative, the size of the Rock and just as popular with the girls, pulled himself up from the bucket seat behind the wheel. “Does this early-morning get-together have anything to do with your adventure last night?” he asked as he shut the door. He locked the Audi with a quiet beep. “I heard you spent your afternoon wading through body parts on the Mall.”
Drake Merigold had been Nick’s teammate for more than a decade. Like Nick, he was a pilot and an Air Force major, though neither of them wore an official uniform. Both were dressed in simple khaki slacks, black golf shirts, and winter jackets.
Nick closed his trunk, his face showing mild surprise. “Did CJ call you?”
An impish grin spread across Drake’s chiseled Greek features. “All the girls call me. You should know that by now.”
Nick rolled his eyes and glanced around the lot, looking for a beat up ’71 Charger that wasn’t there. “Where’s the kid? He lives on base. He should be here by now.”
“Millennials,” said Drake, slinging his own duffel over his shoulder and starting toward the hangars. “They have to spend an extra hour in front of the mirror with hair gel to perfect that just-got-out-of-bed look.”
The two threaded their way through the empty corridors of a low building attached to the hangars until they came to a black door with no knob or handle. White block lettering read:
R7 PERSONNEL ONLY
LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED
Nick swiped a key fob across a gray sensor, punched in a code, and then waited impatiently. There was a whirring sound behind the door, punctuated by irritating squeaks. He frowned. “I think it’s getting slower.”
“I’ll have it checked,” said Drake.
Finally the whirring and squeaking stopped, and the black door slid open, shuddering on its track. They stepped into a circular white chamber, watched the wall rotate 180 degrees, and then steadied themselves as the whole thing jerked into motion and began a long, slow descent. The whirring and squeaking was much louder now that they were inside.
Romeo Seven, the headquarters of the Triple Seven Chase squadron, was five stories beneath Andrews. The facility was constructed from a defunct presidential bunker and boasted a wealth of resources, including a well-stocked clinic, an engineering lab, and its own freshwater supply. The jewel of the bunker, though, was the two-story command center that Nick and Drake entered when they stepped off the aging elevator.
A wide platform spread out before them, lined with crescent-shaped workstations, all facing a forty-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling screen — a screen that Drake had used more than once for a late-night Call of Duty marathon. At the back of the platform, an iron staircase led up to the colonel’s office. Three of the colonel’s four walls were made of smartglass, so he could keep an eye on his minions.
Most of the workstations were empty, but the Triple Seven’s diminutive chief intelligence analyst was clicking away at the one closest to the elevator, pausing occasionally to brush back a thin strand of deep brown hair. There were three pale blue mugs of coffee sitting on the edge of her desk — one black, the other two blond from an excess of cream and sugar. Nick handed one of the desserts to Drake and took the black coffee for himself. He raised it in toast. “Thanks, Molly.”
The analyst looked up and gave him a fleeting smile. Then returned to her computers.
A year before, Molly had been the team’s brown-eyed girl, always smiling, chatty, the brightest and most innocent among them. Then she had fallen in love. She never said a word about her infatuation, and a CIA traitor murdered the object of her passion before she got up the nerve. After that, she collapsed inward. The smile was gone.
Molly didn’t talk much in person, but she did better over the comm links when the ops team was out in the field. Drake had postulated that the digital wall made her feel safe.
As Nick and Drake sipped their coffee, the elevator door squeaked open once more, and the newest and youngest member of the Triple Seven Chase stepped into the command center. Ethan Quinn was a special tactics pararescueman who had joined the ops team to replace the team member lost in Iran. He was a little shorter than Nick, with wayward brown hair and green eyes that made you think he knew something he wasn’t saying. Over the past year and a half, Nick had beaten some of the youthful cockiness out of him, but not all of it.
“This for me?” asked Quinn, reaching for the last mug of coffee.
With her eyes still on her monitors and one hand still typing on the keyboard, Molly pulled the coffee away and set it down on the other side of her desk.
“That means no,” said Drake.
“Get in here, all of you.” Colonel Richard T. Walker appeared at the door of his glass tower. While the ops team wore khakis and polos, the colonel wore his green Army uniform, with crisp edges ironed into the shirtsleeves and pant legs. The unit’s paper cover as a subsection of the DIA’s Directorate for Analysis required it. The colonel had to maintain appearances while working his magic amid the alphabet soup of DC organizations.
“What’d I do this time?” asked Drake.